Falk Schönfeld
One of my prime hobbies is playing board games. Recently I played Detective, a crime board game, which was really great, so I thought I'd write about it, so others might get to have the same experience.
Detective spins a storyline similar to many crime TV series: A crime happens. The players take different roles on the team of investigators. Different clues and leads appear and can be followed. Each clue takes time or resources, which come in the form of the special skills of the different players' roles. Usually, each case imposes a time limit. Visiting different locations also takes additional time, so clever planning brings you an advantage. Clue by clue, you can piece together the plot behind the crime.
Most clues come in the form of printed cards, which contain information. Sometimes you can dig deeper, using extra effort, in which case you typically get to flip the card over and read the back side. But in addition to this traditional setup, an entire online database exists: It contains personal files, DNA and fingerprint comparisons to match criminals to clues left on the crime scene, records of interviews with certain people. You will gradually uncover them by following the clues.
At other places you will get clues which you can search on the open web: places in the real world, historical events, references to certain objects and organizations which are woven into the plot.
Which brings me to one of the real selling points of the game: The plot of all cases is built around real historical events, adding the sense that something similar could actually have happened. It references real political changes to give characters motivation. And some real locations are used, which can and should be googled.
The game contains 5 separate cases. While each can be played on its own, they are linked, and I would suggest playing it as you would play a DnD campaign: with 4-5 people which are not afraid of reading things for playing, and which will be able to make time for this 5-6 times in a row, so you don't have to change people while playing. Each case can affect subsequent cases, depending on which leads you follow. At the end of each case there is a final report in the online database which will tell you which of your assumptions were correct.
Each person gets their own role with special abilities in game, but we usually decided as a group what ability will be used, so it didn't really feel that significant. More important was the player's role outside: Usually one or two persons read the clue cards, one person with a laptop scoured the online database for facts and stuff, one person with a smartphone or laptop did the general web searches, and one person tracked major stuff on a whiteboard. Yes, we used an actual whiteboard. The game actually encourages this and gives you mugshots of certain people to pin to it and connect with lines to try and grasp all the connections. It really gives you that feeling of being that conspiracy guy in that meme with all the documents pinned to the wall, connected by red strings. In some later cases, we actually moved to a digital whiteboard (miro in our case) as the story grew too big for our whiteboard. It's great for shared access and collaboration, and was easier to transport when we played at a different friend's house.
We had a lot of fun playing this. The 5 cases present a captivating story, and the different mechanisms employed in different cases change each round enough to keep each case unique. We played the German version of this game, which only had 2-3 minor mistranslations. The only real complaint I have is that the box said 2-3 hours of play time per case. We usually played 5-6 hours, but also always tried to follow as many clues as possible, so maybe that's on us. One case actually took us two evenings, so overall this thing took us around 30 hours to play.
Given that it costs around 25€, I'd say that it is a great deal. Go try it out for yourselves!
Below is a screenshot of our whiteboard for the entire case. Somewhat pixelated, but will give you a rough impression of how many clues we collected for all the cases. If you look too closely, you might also get some clues you should NOT get at this point though!
